Why I buy this one ?
- Movie Magic Screenwriter's mix of powerful features, adaptability to your working style, and ease-of-use blew away the competition
- Expanded Production Features-including an automated Revision Draft process, Productions Solutions help, and onscreen Revision Draft colors-are organized on their own dedicated menu
- Built-in index cards are fully editable
- Create countless unique character names from NameBank's huge database of male, female, and last names
- Exports to StoryBoard Quick format for scene visualization

What our customer's say!

"Lots of problems", I've read a lot of good reviews for this program, and it came highly recommended. But I've had so many problems with the software, (I'm PC based), and have had no response from Technical Support, email or otherwise. The links on their site mainly are dead. I am planning to buy the competitor product. Screenwriter has been a frustrating program, and a waste of my money.

Some of the recurring problems:
- Generates roughly a third of the script's breakdown, then stops.
- "Print to PDF" function consistently creates a blank PDF file.

"Pretty Good for what I Need", This all started when I began writing a screenplay on spec. I setup my Word program with as much of the Hollywood standard format as I could, but I started having problems with certain elements (e.g., parentheticals within dialog, CONT'd's at the end of pages). So I picked MMS because it seemed to be the most powerful at the lowest cost. I also liked that it had play and novel formats. It did a decent and fairly painless job of importing my screenplay from Word. Unfortunately, it turned many of my shot headings into character elements for dialog. I had to manually fix all these, but MMS made changing the type of element fairly easy.

So far, my only real negative is with scene headings. Hitting enter after a scene heading, a list of possible time references comes up (day, night, continuous, etc.). I often like to use SAME TIME as a time reference, but I haven't found any way to add or change the list.

Otherwise, I'm very satisfied with the program so far, and it does so much a regular word processor won't do for you.

"best of its kind, not as popular as it deserves to be.", I'll keep this short because I'm supposed to be writing! I used to use Final Draft for all my TV work (Wire In The Blood, Hornblower). I even recommended it to the BBC when they still used Word for screenplays. Then a friend and producer showed me Screenwriter and I have never looked back. It's far more intuitive than FD in so many ways, it makes it easier to just concentrate on the text. And technically Screenwriter is far more solid - I have never used a version of Final Draft that didn't have numerous really irritating bugs, which tech support could never seem to resolve despite endless patches. I haven't patched Screenwriter for years quite simply because I don't need to - it just works. I'm sorry I ever backed FD now, but it's almost the standard program in the UK. I often write my stuff in Screenwriter and import it into FD for submission.

Note that FD tech support costs money whereas Screenwriter's doesn't. How can the smaller company afford to provide free tech support? I suspect the answer is simple: that hardly anyone ever needs it. And to the reviewer who complained about the CUT TO's clogging up his script: you can switch all that stuff off you know!

"The best out there....", Of all the screenwriting / scriptwriting software out there today, this is by far the best one. Everything you need to get started is there and it's very user friendly. I had never used it before but was able to start writing within minutes of opening the box. I also recommend david Trottier's book The Screenwriter's Bible, as a companion for the software. I have found both to be invaluable.

"Works great.", I bought the Movie Magic Screenwriter a few months ago. It works great. I had no difficulty importing a draft from microsoft word. I run the program on my mac powerbook G4. It works great, I can make PDFs and print easily. There have been no crashes, and it all works seemlessly. I definitely recommend the software.

I was going to purchase Final Draft, but the reviews talking about crashes, etc, scared me off. And that this software is recommended by the Screenwriter Guild convinced me.

Enjoy.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Movie Magic is magic", Movie Magic is a very excellent product. I have never wrote a screen play before and it is very easy,and you only use 3 keys. I highly recoment this product. thank You, Phillip

"Sorry... Final Draft is better... NOT Buggy", I tried this and Final Draft side by side while evaluating what to buy. Final Draft is just less buggy and more professional.

Movie Magic pops the cursor around the screen after an operation. It also has these windows 3.1 looking interface windows. The speech system is too dependent on windows and not self contained like Final Draft.

True, there is more customization with Movie Magic... but I like Final Draft MUCH better. Run them next to each other and u will see.

Mike

"Professional's tool", I am both a working screenwriter and script supervisor. I use Movie Magic Screenwriter for both those jobs. Its an excellent, straight-forward, and cleanly built program for formating and writing professionally styled scripts.

Compared to Final Draft Movie Magic's formatting simply looks cleaner - with more accurate and useful spacing, sluglines, and transitions - and is far easier to use. Now this doesn't mean it will teach you how to write or what to write, but it does mean what you do write will at least look good.

Minor problems I've had and things that could change for the better...Screenwriter is a tad unstable with Windows XP and occasionally crashes at start-up (although I have yet to lose a file because of that). Some of the production tools - like scene numbering and CONTINUEDs - are buried deep in the program and not the least bit easy to get to. Also they still have annoying and non-standard formatting in there sluglines and transitions. For instance you can select Continuous and Moments Later for a time portion of your slugline. Any oen that works in production knows that there is no Continuous or Moments Later. Simply either DAY or NIGHT. For transitions they still have CUT TO which is no longer used.

Aside from those minor things Movie Magic is an excellent script writing program.

"not as easy as they make it sound!", I am just getting started using the program so I can not yet judge the overall product. I can tell you that the product description said: just load the software and you will be writing scripts in minutes regardless if you are a first timer or a pro.

That is a stretch. I had to get a tech guy to load the program and then it really is not walking me through the "how to" part of script writing.

Just be prepared to spend some time at the beginning.

"Good script writing software.", For years, I used to use Microsoft Word to develop all of my scripts in. While it could be done, it wasn't the best nor the easiest way to do it. I had always put off buying specialized software to do something that but the problem is that I spent more time formatting and paginating my scripts than I did writing.

Finally, I decided to break down and buy scripting software. But before deciding on which one to buy I did a little research on the titles that were currently available. I wanted to make sure I got the best product for the right price. What ultimatly sold me on Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000 was that both the Writers' Guild of America and Project Greenlight both recommend this software.

One of the claims made by the software company is the ability to get up and running right out of the box. I found this to be--for the most part--true. Upon receiving my copy, I was entering my first script in about 30 minutes (including installation time). There are some things that you may need to know, but the software company was intuitive enough to add booklets that contain this information in it so that you didn't have to hunt through the manual.

There are also a nice collection of templates included with the software that allows you to write for both movie and television (like I do). The templates for the TV shows comes in many different flavors (Sci-fi, sit-coms, dramas, etc.) and are even set up in the format used by several different shows.

What I especially appreciated was the fact that Screenwriter 2000 kept track of the names of my characters. I used to have to do this on scratch pads and Post-It notes or I would have to read back in the script to find a name. In Screenwriter 2000, I can call up a list of names to find the one I'm looking for. I'm able to do the same thing with scene heading, so I can keep my scenes in a consistant format.

Since I post some of my work on Zoetrope.com for review by other writers, the fact that I can create an Adobe file (.pdf format) was also of importance to me. While I could use a translation program to turn my Word document into an Adobe file, such translators have their problem and don't always retain the format that you created. With Screenwriter 2000, my Adobe documents come out looking the same as the original file. But this feature wasn't as intuitive as I had thought it would be. I was expecting this feature to be a part of the file exporting system. Instead, it's part of the print function. (You "print" a .pdf file.)

While there are a lot of pros about the software, there were also several cons, which is why I only rated it four stars. One is that this software is set up to installed on both the Mac and the PC from the same box. Becuase of that, they designed the user manual to address both opperating systems by printing it as a flip book. (One side has the instructions for the PC--flip the book over--the other side has the instructions for the Mac.) This means that the index is in the center. If you use an index as often as I do, plan on placing a bookmark there.

Another problem is that not all of the features available to the PC user is available to the Mac user. As of this review, only one feature--the Storyboard Linking--was not available on the Mac. However, this should be of little consiquence to the average user (unless you're a professional writer in Hollywood with a Mac).

Finally, one feature that was touted to me time and again was the voice readback capability. By using a Text-to-Speech engine, you can have your script read back to you, even to the point of assigning different voices to the different characters. It took a little effort to get this feature working on my PC, and when I did it sounded like a room full of Stephen Hawkings reading my screenplay.

Still, as softwares goes, this is possibly the best product out on the market.